Month: December 2017

I feel like I may have already mentioned this on the Twitter, but I feel like I need to put out a reminder PSA for folks that perhaps were asleep at the terminal or looking at their iPhone playing Pokemon Go… DirSync and AzureAD Sync Service will no longer connect as of 1 January 2018. Only AzureAD Connect will actually be able to connect to AzureAD to allow for imports of projected identities from your on-premises Active Directory or other LDAP based system.

You have been informed.

Why would I be using DirSync you might ask yourself? The primary reason being so that you’ve got all of your users’ identities and attribute information showing up properly within Office 365 (or within other applications that you’re hosting within Azure and need an identity source to pull from). Where do these user identities show up you might ask yourself? Within any contact card or anything that tracks a user.

Moving on… About a year ago, in April 2016, Microsoft deprecated DirSync and Azure AD Sync Services in favor of AzureAD Connect. They did this in a blog post. Some people may have missed it. Others put a sticky note in their cubical and then forgot it when another sticky note was placed on top of it reminding them to renew an SSL certificate.

If you’re not familiar with AzureAD Connect, you probably haven’t logged into your Azure portal (oh, by the way, it’s no longer manage.windowsazure.com, but rather it’s portal.azure.com) or you haven’t logged into the Admin terminal of your Office 365 portal to check on your Directory Synchronization status. Regardless, the time has come to go and figure out what you’re going to do so that your directory synchronization with AzureAD doesn’t go offline and break because of lack of upgrading to what is supported.

How do you go about upgrading to AzureAD Connect? RTM… or read the manual for those that aren’t familiar with acronyms.

Where do I find the manual though?

I’m glad you asked… as a typical search using your favorite search engine probably wouldn’t bring up the results until you clicked on the Search button. . .

All in all, it’s pretty simple to upgrade to your basic environments. If you have additional complex rule sets for performing combinations of actions while performing a projection into AzureAD from your on-premises AD, you’ll want to go in and figure out what they are within the MIIS Client so that you can recreate them or validate them within AzureAD Connect.

Good luck and hope that you’re able to make the deadline of midnight on the 31st of December as we ring in the new year!

It’s interesting to look back at the past year and realize that I haven’t really been listening to all that many podcasts – whether professionally or personally. There are a few that are epic that should be on everyone’s queues to include:

If you’ve been working with Azure for a while you may have come across a need to make use of Azure’s Access Control Services. This service offering or capability effectively allowed developers to create something that was hosted on Azure but have authentication and authorization to be completed performed outside of the application that a developer was building.

In many cases, developers that were looking to integrate with services like Facebook, Twitter, or another Active Directory would make use of ACS to handle the authentication and authorization and allow the developer to focus on what they were developing within their App. This was great in that it was effectively performing a lot of heavy lifting without a lot of code.

As Azure is continuing to evolve, change happens and in this case we see Access Control Services entering a deprecated state where it will no longer be support as of November 7, 2018. What’s all this mean to you? Perhaps nothing if you’re not using ACS. If you are however using ACS, it’s still fully operational, but similar to the Death Star, in the near future it will cease to exist.

Nonetheless, consider yourself informed when you’re working with a client or with your fellow developers that you’ll need to consider how to begin building a transition plan to make use of something like Azure Active Directory or another offering of Azure’s per the migration guidance aforementioned. Happy developing!